It's reliant on technology called Avalon that will ship with Longhorn. Microsoft last week released a technical specification for Metro and plans to license the technology, based on XML, at no charge.More details about the Metro format at InformationWeek
Microsoft plans to replace PDF with Metro
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Last week Microsoft announced a new file format that will become an integrated part of Longhorn, named Metro. It will likely become a tough rival for Adobe's popular PDF format as Metro is a combination of a file format, document viewer and page description language.